The library of king Perseus was the only portion of the Macedonian
spoil that Paullus took for himself, with the view of presenting it
to his sons. Even Greek painters and sculptors were found in his
train and completed the aesthetic training of his children. That
the time was past when men could in this field preserve a merely
repellent attitude as regarded Hellenism, had been felt even by
Cato; the better classes had probably now a presentiment that the
noble substance of Roman character was less endangered by Hellenism
as a whole, than by Hellenism mutilated and misshapen: the mass of
the upper society of Rome and Italy went along with the new mode.

There had been for long no want of Greek schoolmasters in Rome; now
they arrived in troops--and as teachers not merely of the language
but of literature and culture in general--at the newly-opened
lucrative market for the sale of their wisdom. Greek tutors and
teachers of philosophy, who, even if they were not slaves, were
as a rule accounted as servants,(17) were now permanent inmates
in the palaces of Rome; people speculated in them, and there is
a statement that 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds) were paid for
a Greek literary slave of the first rank.

17. Cicero says that he treated his learned slave Dionysius more
respectfully than Scipio treated Panaetius, and in the same sense
it is said in Lucilius:--